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Fame (1980)

Rate: 7
Viewed: 2/17

Fame
2/17: I was all over the map about how I felt about Fame, thinking of a rating between '6' and '8' before settling on '7'.

It's actually a good movie, starting off well in the first half hour before going in circles the rest of the way with no growth or change among the characters. The editing is well-done, and freshness abounds. Therefore, it's hard to be bored.

There are many subplots, but nearly all are never properly developed. However, they don't make Fame frustrating. It's not a musical but a drama film. Yet it doesn't feel like drama, either. Hence, the best way to describe the whole thing is that it's a panorama of adolescence in poverty.

As a secondary mathematics teacher, I used to work in a vocational-technical school, and many of my students were from the performing arts program. They were minorities who lived in poverty. Regardless, the students thought they were talented and knew everything, but nothing could be further from the truth. They couldn't sing, dance, or act while knowing nothing about anything. The whole thing was a joke. After "graduating" from high school despite not being able to read, write, or perform arithmetic on grade level or doing no real work in academics for four years, they went back to poverty because they had nothing to offer to prospective employers.

The whole performing arts program is the biggest pile of bullshit ever conceived. Whatever the skills students gained from it rarely translate in real life. Because all the students wanted to do was talk, they didn't work that much on their reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. My theory of this is the administrators knew these teenagers were in a hopeless situation due to their low IQ, so the program was created just to keep the trouble down by providing them false hopes until they graduate.

Back to Fame, the acting is top-notch given the material, and the characters are supposed to be untalented. They think they're special, but really, they are not. The problems that had emerged toward the end are realistic and typical. That's why there's a saying, "A leopard doesn't change its spots." By the way, I hate The Rocky Horror Show and think it's one of the worst movies made. But kudos to Alan Parker for bringing a perspective to it by illustrating how a bad movie can be made better by taking advantage of the audience's participation.

All in all, Fame should be called Fake because it's about high school performing arts students who thought they could sing, dance, or act but were, quite frankly, untalented.